“It’s very fundamental in politics to be what you are,” says Sen. John H. Chafee. “‘To thine own self be true.’ Don’t be out there dropping your g’s and trying to get into a ‘dese and dose’ way of speaking to be one of the guys.”

A couple of years ago Oates met with C. B. Scott Jones, a former Navy fighter pilot who was on the staff of Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. Thanks to a demonstration using his own speech, Scott Jones was convinced that Oates has really got something here. A few months later, during the Gulf crisis, Oates told him that press conferences and speeches of high U.S. officials, when played backward, kept yielding the name Simone. Scott Jones wrote Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, warning him that if Simone was a code word, the cat was out of the bag (or, at least, the tac was out of the gab).

One thing that was soon playing backward in Washington was Scott Jones’s career on Capitol Hill. Pell, a Democrat facing a fight for reelection, dropped him. Now Scott Jones heads the Human Potential Foundation, whose mission, he says, is to fund research that is not being funded anywhere else. (more…)